Truth and lies

"Bob has his trainers feeding dogs baloney treats. We don't do any of that mushy stuff."

(The Robert Crais books are extremely enjoyable reading, by the way: the first is Suspect, the second is The Promise. Crais's books have in my opinion gotten better and better; where Michael Connelly's have become more formulaic over the years (with the last few Bosch books feeling like thinned-out outlines of their former selves), these have become richer and more complicated in terms of character and voice.

Cookie-tickets

The cats are one of the few bright points in Inside Llewyn Davis, which I saw last night with G. It is a watchable but bleak film, minor in its ambitions. I liked Luc Sante's account (that's the movie I saw, unless I'd been reviewing it for Cat Fancy or similar!); here's another interesting related link.

Closing tabs:

Indestructible but non-delicious gingerbread houses; the great Finnish gingerbread ticket fiasco of 2013.

I need to do a proper light reading end-of-year roundup, but that entails reading back through the year's blog posts, and I am not sure I have the vim to do it this evening. Currently having very enjoyable Susan Howatch reread - I reread the three St. Benet's books and now am on the second of the Starbridge novels. Appealingly both like and unlike Trollope.

Faux bedroom synthtronica

Simon Holland's bedroom cassette masters project erases the line between history and fiction:

I began to be approached by people who wanted to have their music on the compilation but who had not even been alive in the eighties. They were contemporary bedroom musicians, usually with a small collection of vintage analogue instruments and equipment who were committed to producing work using authentic vintage methods. So I had an idea: let them produce their music in-the-style-of lo-fi, cassette-based, bedroom-recorded demos and provide a short biography suggesting they had in fact been produced between 1980-89. They had to carefully date their recordings based on the manufacture dates of the vintage synths they were using to avoid any anachronisms and think of artistic motivation based on age, sex and geography. And so I re-wrote the submission brief to include the sound-alikes, and the music kept coming in but I no longer knew if I was listening to something truly historic or retro-perfect facsimiles.

(Via.)

Iron Mike

At the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates on Mike Tyson's memoir (I want to read this one - I have a nascent boxing obsession that I hope to let ramp up in 2014):

The title Undisputed Truth is a play on the familiar boxing phrase “undisputed champion”—as in “Mike Tyson, undisputed heavyweight champion of the world,” delivered in a ring announcer’s booming voice and much heard during the late 1980s and early 1990s. A more appropriate title for this lively mixture of a memoir would be Disputed Truth. These recollections of Tyson’s tumultuous life began as a one-man Las Vegas act at the MGM casino. It is now shaped into narrative form by a professional writer best known as the collaborator of the “shock comic” Howard Stern and is aimed to shock, titillate, amuse, and entertain, since much in it is wildly surreal and unverifiable. (Like the claim that “I’m such a monster. I turned the Romanian Mafia onto coke” and that Tyson was a guest at the Billionaire Club in Sardinia, “where a bottle of champagne cost something like $100,000.”)

Mostly, Undisputed Truth is a memoir of indefatigable name-dropping and endless accounts of “partying”; there is a photograph of Tyson with Maya Angelou, who came to visit him in Indiana when he was imprisoned for rape; we learn that Tyson converted to Islam in prison (“That was my first encounter with true love and forgiveness”), but as soon as he was freed, he returns to his old, debauched life, plunging immediately into debt:

I had to have an East Coast mansion…so I went out and bought the largest house in the state of Connecticut. It was over fifty thousand square feet and had thirteen kitchens and nineteen bedrooms…. In the six years I owned it, you could count the number of times I was actually there on two hands.

This palatial property is but one of four luxurious mansions Tyson purchases in the same manic season, along with exotic wild animals (lion, white tiger cubs) and expensive automobiles—“Vipers, Spyders, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis.” We hear of Tyson’s thirtieth birthday party at his Connecticut estate with a guest list including Oprah, Donald Trump, Jay Z, and “street pimps and their hos.” In line with Tyson’s newfound Muslim faith, he stations outside the house “forty big Fruit of Islam bodyguards.”

Good description, too, of the 1997 Tyson-Holyfield "ear-biting fracas."

Note to self

It is very strange: I've been thinking at the back of my mind all day about a review I drafted last week that didn't come out quite right and that I didn't have time to sit down with properly during daytime hours today due to other obligations.  But as I finished tomorrow's reading for lecture (the first two books of Tom Jones), not only did the brand-new first paragraph of the reimagined review burst into my mind, I also near-simultaneously thought of a different and better way of handling two representative arguments about the 'minute particular' in a talk I'm giving next week.  I feel more alert and cognitively capable than I have all day; have scrawled down a rough version of the new opening for the review as well as a memorandum about my intended mobilization of notionally opposing arguments about detail and historicity by Hartley and Sheridan, and will shortly stop work to try and wind down for the night....

Better set alarm very early to work on that review properly and get it sent off before my 10:30 appointment at the gym: nighttime is mentally active, for better and for worse, but writing proper generally needs to be done before I get sucked into the vortex of the rest of the day!  This post can be considered a thank-you note to Fielding for prompting intellectual activity, even if I do not love his novels the way I love Richardson's.

Error correction

It was not, honestly, the most inspiring event in the world, although there were several priceless moments (audience question: "What is your most sentimental memory of Mr. Warhol?" - long silence - Mo Tucker [who is absolutely delightful], dryly: "I remember chasing him around the Factory trying to get him to give me $5 gas money to get home" - random audience member: "Did you get it?" MT: "Yes"!) - but I am still slightly in amazement that I just saw significant members of the Velvet Underground interviewed by an incredibly fatuous music journalist who reminded me why I do not read much music journalism!

Supposedly the event sold out online in 3 minutes and 20 seconds. It turned out to be a tie-in with The Velvet Underground: New York Art, which I think it will be worth my while to purchase, with the caveat that Lou Reed, as David Fricke quoted at him some inane casual remark of his own (on the topic of CCR) from an old interview, as part of a rant about inaccuracies in journalism said of the book's editor, "I love Johan but there are three mistakes on the second page!" (Or was it "two mistakes on the first page"?)

(The documenters and interviewers seem to have curiously little idea how the people who make the stuff actually think and behave!)